Social Media

Foursquare Changes the Game ... Literally

Earlier this week the much-anticipated Foursquare everywhere release came to fruition, making the location-based mobile game available to all regardless of their physical location. Details behind the everywhere launch and how it affected the overall game experience, however, were sparse. Until now.

The City Shake Up

The whole Foursquare experience used to be centered around your city, so badges and check-ins were city-specific, and anytime you'd find yourself in another city you'd essentially need to start over from scratch. Foursquare everywhere turns that model upside down, so now you can place yourself anywhere in the world (instead of Foursquare locking you down in the nearest city).

You'll also notice that adding new venues is now address-optional. Instead, Foursquare finally got smart: If you opt to skip the physical address entry step when you check in at a new venue, they'll automatically attach your GPS location — as pinpointed by your mobile device — to define the venue's location. Given how tedious it is to manually enter the address of a new place, especially with the knowledge that your GPS-enabled phone knows where you are, we find this to be the most welcome development of all.

Badges of Honor

Duplicate badges are donzo, which means gone are the days when you could earn the Newbie badge for each new city you traveled to. When it comes to badges, think of them as no longer constrained to a particular city, but worldwide badges of honor you carry with you. In fact, you can earn badges anywhere in the world and take them with you as travel. So, if you've unlocked the School Night badge in San Diego, there's no need to try to stay out all night in New York (on a week night) to repeat your previous coup.

For those of you who love a challenge, Foursquare everywhere now includes a whole new set of badges for you to try to unlock. There are a total of 10 new ones (three pictured above), but we also know that even more are on the way. Since there is such an allure around unlocking mystery badges, we won't spoil the fun, but we know that some of you at CES have managed to unlock a few of these new treasures.

Who's on Top?

I personally play the Foursquare check-in game for the mayorships, badges and tips from friends, but some of you take rising to the top of your city's leaderboard very seriously. If that's you, pay close attention, because the rules have changed slightly.

With the city-lockdown lifted, Foursquare now organizes local leaderboards by your proximity to other Foursquare users. Now you'll be ranked against everyone who has accrued points within 25 miles (40 km) of your current location. You probably won't notice the change too much, but we think it's a smart play and opens up the competition elements to Foursquare users on the fringe of larger playing fields.

Coming Soon

With money in the bank, Foursquare is pushing out improvements at lightning speed. In the coming weeks you can expect a spiffy new version of the iPhone app — version 1.5 — to be released in the App Store. While there won't be tons of cosmetic changes to this update, you can expect 1.5 to be more sophisticated when it comes to locating and serving up more accurate places nearby. Eventually the iPhone app will also support more "Trending Nearby" functionality to call out hot places. We also know that the team is working on drastic UX improvements to the iPhone app, so you can expect a major redesign in the coming months.

When it comes to other mobile devices, the beta BlackBerry app is being tested by 5,000 users and Foursquare plans to push this to the public in about a week. And of course, Palm Pre users can already get their hands on that app now.

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